On the new channel, they weren’t calling the Fog “natural”. I changed the channel right there, cutting off a blonde newswoman mid-sentence. They said that the entire nation was being covered at an unbelievably quick rate, and the President had been evacuated for his own safety. They said the Black Fog was “perfectly natural” and “explainable”. The news anchors were calm, but to my dismay, they had nothing to report. If anything was being done about the Black Fog, surely they would have reported it. I sat down, took a few deep breaths to calm myself, turned on the TV, and began to watch the news. It was as though I was standing in my house at night. Only a little of it got in when I opened the door, but I could still see. The Fog hadn’t gotten in my house, which I was thankful for. I hurried inside, quickly closing the door behind me. I worked my way to the front door of the house, and sighed in relief when I realized it was mine. I wasn’t entirely sure if it was my yard. I had to walk around a parked car and, after tripping over the curb and falling onto the sidewalk on the other side of the road, my shoes felt grass beneath them. How close to my house was I? I just gave it my best guess and made my way forward. I climbed to my feet with my sense of direction disoriented. I took my steps with care, and tripped over a blunt object when I was halfway across the street. I began walking toward my house uneasily, still hearing people cry out for help. If I could find my way inside, I could wait the Fog out and see if it would disappear and leave the city. My house was a few yards down across the street. In my mind, I could picture the street as it had been before the Fog hit. There was the screeching of tires as cars stopped and the crunching of metal as other cars crashed into each other. I heard people screaming, the sound frightfully clear. The world around me looked as though it were covered in smoke, but I could breathe in it normally. I stumbled through the Fog, unable to even see my own two hands in front of me. It swept over the city quickly, shrouding me in a cave of blackness. Some hysterical woman wailed, “It’s here!” as I looked up at the Black Fog blotting out the sky. Cars stopped in the middle of the road, leading other cars to crash into them. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dark giant stood up over the horizon and loomed over the city, blotting out the sun. If there’s anything I remember from that day, it was the colors. The bright yellow orb in the sky beamed down on the world, covering us in sunlight. A red car, the sides splattered with a thick mud, raced past me. The grass was bright green in the warm summer atmosphere, and there were only a few white clouds in the sky to distract from the wild blue yonder above. Coming toward me down the sidewalk was a mother pushing a baby stroller with an enthusiastic little boy running ahead of her, cheerfully telling his mommy to hurry up. I was walking home that fateful afternoon, turning a streetcorner to see my 2-story home come into view down the street. There was a few more days of chaotic news reports, and then the Black Fog came to my town. Nearly every scenario imaginable was told as a reason for the Black Fog’s existence: God’s wrath on humanity, the apocalypse, aliens seeking a safe place to land their spacecraft, the Black Fog was simple fog mixed with pollutants in the air, it was a publicity stunt for a new movie, it was the government using the Fog for some purpose, Cthulhu was rising… We heard everything, but none of the theories seemed to make sense. It quickly became obvious to me that these “prophets of the apocalypse” were nothing more than crazies who walked into the news stations from off the street. With mass hysteria of this magnitude, it can safely be assumed that plenty of doomsday prophets came forward with “explanations” about the Fog’s origin.
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